忐忑是什么意思：新托福TPO21阅读原文及译文(三)

2020年11月30日发(作者：吕蒙正)


新托福TPO21阅读原文(一)：Geothermal Energy
TPO21-1：Geothermal Energy
Earth's internal heat, fueled by radioactivity, provides the energy for plate
tectonics and continental drift, mountain building, and earthquakes. It can also be
harnessed to drive electric generators and heat homes. Geothermal energy becomes
available in a practical form when underground heat is transferred by water that is
heated as it passes through a subsurface region of hot rocks (a heat reservoir) that may
be hundreds or thousands of feet deep. The water is usually naturally occurring
groundwater that seeps down along fractures in the rock; less typically, the water is
artificially introduced by being pumped down from the surface. The water is brought
to the surface, as a liquid or steam, through holes drilled for the purpose.
By far the most abundant form of geothermal energy occurs at the relatively low
temperatures of 80°to 180°centigrade. Water circulated through heat reservoirs in this
temperature range is able to extract enough heat to warm residential, commercial, and
industrial spaces. More than 20,000 apartments in France are now heated by warm
underground water drawn from a heat reservoir in a geologic structure near Paris
called the Paris Basin. Iceland sits on a volcanic structure known as the Mid-Atlantic
Ridge. Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is entirely heated by geothermal energy
derived from volcanic heat.
Geothermal reservoirs with temperatures above 180°centigrade are useful for
generating electricity. They occur primarily in regions of recent volcanic activity as
hot, dry rock; natural hot water; or natural steam. The latter two sources are limited to
those few areas where surface water seeps down through underground faults or
fractures to reach deep rocks heated by the recent activity of molten rock material.
The world's largest supply of natural steam occurs at The Geysers, 120 kilometers
north of San Francisco, California. In the 1990s enough electricity to meet about half
the needs of San Francisco was being generated there. This facility was then in its
third decade of production and was beginning to show signs of decline, perhaps
because of over development. By the late 1990s some 70 geothermal


electric-generating plants were in operation in California, Utah, Nevada, and Hawaii,
generating enough power to supply about a million people. Eighteen countries now
generate electricity using geothermal heat.
Extracting heat from very hot, dry rocks presents a more difficult problem: the
rocks must be fractured to permit the circulation of water, and the water must be
provided artificially. The rocks are fractured by water pumped down at very high
pressures. Experiments are under way to develop technologies for exploiting this
resource.
Like most other energy sources, geothermal energy presents some environmental
problems. The surface of the ground can sink if hot groundwater is withdrawn without
being replaced. In addition, water heated geothermally can contain salts and toxic
materials dissolved from the hot rock. These waters present a disposal problem if they
are not returned to the ground from which they were removed.
The contribution of geothermal energy to the world's energy future is difficult to
estimate. Geothermal energy is in a sense not renewable, because in most cases the
heat would be drawn out of a reservoir much more rapidly than it would be replaced
by the very slow geological processes by which heat flows through solid rock into a
heat reservoir. However, in many places (for example, California, Hawaii, the
Philippines, Japan, Mexico, the rift valleys of Africa)the resource is potentially so
large that its future will depend on the economics of production. At present, we can
make efficient use of only naturally occurring hot water or steam deposits. Although
the potential is enormous, it is likely that in the near future geothermal energy can
make important local contributions only where the resource is close to the user and
the economics are favorable, as they are in California, New Zealand, and Iceland.
Geothermal energy probably will not make large-scale contributions to the world
energy budget until well into the twenty-first century, if ever.
TPO21-1译文：地热能
地球内部因放射产生的热量为板块运动 、大陆漂移、造山运动和地震提供了
能量。这种热量还可以用来驱动发电机发电以及为家庭供暖。水流经 地表下可能


几百甚至几千英尺深的热岩区域(一种热储)被加热，当被加热的水 将热量传递出
来时，地热能就可以实际形式加以利用了。这些水通常是沿着岩石的断面下渗的
天 然地下水，少数情况下是人为从地表泵入的水。通过为了采集地热能所钻的孔，
这些水会以液体或蒸汽的 形式被带到地表。
到目前为止，最丰富的地热能形式介于相对较低的80到180摄氏度的温度。
在此温度范围内的热储内循环的水可以提取出足够的热量供居住区、商业区和工
业区取暖。目前 在法国有20 000间以上的公寓是由温暖的地下水供暖的，这些
地下水来自位于巴黎附近叫做巴黎盆 地的地质构造的热储。冰岛位于一个被称为
是大西洋中脊的火山构造之上。冰岛的首都雷克雅维克完全是 用火山热产生的地
热能供暖的。
温度高于180摄氏度的地热储集层可用来发电。这类地 热储集层主要位于有
近期火山活动的区域，以干热的岩石、天然热水或天然蒸汽的形式存在。后两种形式的储集层局限于少数区域，在这些区域，地表水通过地下断层或断裂渗入到
被近期的熔岩活动加 热的深层岩石。世界上最大的天然蒸汽供应位于加州旧金山
以北120公里处的盖沙斯。二十世纪九十年 代，那里产出的电能足够满足旧金山
半数的需求。当时该电厂已经有三十个年头了，开始显示出发电量下 降的迹象，
这可能是由于过度的开发所致。到二十世纪九十年代末，加州、犹他州、内华达
州和 夏威夷约有70个地热发电厂在运转，产生的电能足够满足一百万人的需求。
目前有18个国家在利用地 热能发电。
要从极干热的岩石中提取热量存在一个更大的难题：岩石需要有裂缝才能让
水 流通，而且水必须是人工提供的。通过泵入高压水可以将岩石断裂。开发利用
此能源的技术的实验正在进 行之中。


就像大多数其它能源一样，地热能也具有一些环境问题。如果抽 取地下热水
而又不泵回，地表就会下沉。此外，地热加热的水含有从热岩中溶出的盐分和有
毒物 质。这些水如果不能被输送回抽取的地方，将会产生处理方面的问题。
地热能对世界能源未来的贡 献是难以估量的。地热能在某种意义上讲是不可
再生的，因为多数情况下，与热量流经坚硬的岩石到达热 储这个极为缓慢的地质
作用的更新速度相比，从热储提取热量的速度要快得多。不过，在很多地区(例< br>如加州、夏威夷、菲律宾、日本、墨西哥、非洲的裂谷)，这种能源可能非常可
观，它的前景将取 决于经济的生产。目前，我们只能有效地利用天然形成的热水
或蒸汽形式的地热能。尽管潜能巨大，近期 之内地热能可能只能对毗邻用户以及
经济状况良好的地区做出重要的局部贡献，就像在加州、新西兰和冰 岛地区的情
况一样。如果可能的话，地热能估计要到二十一世纪才能对世界的能源预算做出
大的 贡献。
新托福TPO21阅读原文(二)：The Origins of Agriculture
TPO21-2：The Origins of Agriculture
How did it come about that farming developed independently in a number of
world centers (the Southeast Asian mainland, Southwest Asia, Central America,
lowland and highland South America, and equatorial Africa) at more or less the same
time? Agriculture developed slowly among populations that had an extensive
knowledge of plants and animals. Changing from hunting and gathering to agriculture
had no immediate advantages. To start with, it forced the population to abandon the
nomad's life and become sedentary, to develop methods of storage and, often, systems
of irrigation. While hunter-gatherers always had the option of moving elsewhere when
the resources were exhausted, this became more difficult with farming. Furthermore,
as the archaeological record shows, the state of health of agriculturalists was worse
than that of their contemporary hunter- gatherers.


Traditionally, it was believed that the transition to agriculture was the result of a
worldwide population crisis. It was argued that once hunter-gatherers had occupied
the whole world, the population started to grow everywhere and food became scarce;
agriculture would have been a solution to this problem. We know, however, that
contemporary hunter-gatherer societies control their population in a variety of ways.
The idea of a world population crisis is therefore unlikely, although population
pressure might have arisen in some areas.
Climatic changes at the end of the glacial period 13,000 years ago have been
proposed to account for the emergence of farming. The temperature increased
dramatically in a short period of time (years rather than centuries), allowing for a
growth of the hunting-gathering population due to the abundance of resources. There
were, however, fluctuations in the climatic conditions, with the consequences that wet
conditions were followed by dry ones, so that the availability of plants and animals
oscillated brusquely.
It would appear that the instability of the climatic conditions led populations that
had originally been nomadic to settle down and develop a sedentary style of life,
which led in turn to population growth and to the need to increase the amount of food
available. Farming originated in these conditions. Later on, it became very difficult to
change because of the significant expansion of these populations. It could be argued,
however, that these conditions are not sufficient to explain the origins of agriculture.
Earth had experienced previous periods of climatic change, and yet agriculture had
not been developed.
It is archaeologist Steven Mithen's thesis, brilliantly developed in his book The
Prehistory of the Mind (1996), that approximately 40,000 years ago the human mind
developed cognitive fluidity, that is, the integration of the specializations of the mind:
technical, natural history (geared to understanding the behavior and distribution of
natural resources), social intelligence, and the linguistic capacity. Cognitive fluidity
explains the appearance of art, religion, and sophisticated speech. Once humans
possessed such a mind, they were able to find an imaginative solution to a situation of
severe economic crisis such as the farming dilemma described earlier. Mithen


proposes the existence of four mental elements to account for the emergence of
farming: (1) the ability to develop tools that could be used intensively to harvest and
process plant resources; (2) the tendency to use plants and animals as the medium to
acquire social prestige and power; (3) the tendency to develop
with animals structurally similar to those developed with people—specifically, the
ability to think of animals as people (anthropomorphism) and of people as animals
(totemism); and (4) the tendency to manipulate plants and animals.
The fact that some societies domesticated animals and plants, discovered the use
of metal tools, became literate, and developed a state should not make us forget that
others developed pastoralism or horticulture (vegetable gardening) but remained
illiterate and at low levels of productivity; a few entered the modern period as hunting
and gathering societies. It is anthropologically important to inquire into the conditions
that made some societies adopt agriculture while others remained hunter-gatherers or
horticulturalists. However, it should be kept in mind that many societies that knew of
agriculture more or less consciously avoided it. Whether Mithen's explanation is
satisfactory is open to contention, and some authors have recently emphasized the
importance of other factors.
TPO21-2译文：农业的起源
农业是如何独立的在多个世界中心(东南亚大陆、西南亚、中美 洲、南美的
高地与低地以及赤道非洲地区)几乎同时发展起来的呢?在那些熟知动植物的人
中农 业发展得相当缓慢。从狩猎和采集转变为农耕并没有显而易见的好处。首先，
它会迫使人们放弃游牧生活 并定居下来，发明贮存方法和通常所需的灌溉系统。
采集狩猎者往往可以选择在资源耗尽的时候迁到他处 ，对于耕作者来说就没这么
容易。而且，考古学记录显示，农民的健康状况要比同时代的采集狩猎者差。
传统上认为向农业转变是世界性人口危机带来的结果。有人认为一旦采集狩
猎者遍及全世界 ，人口开始增长，食物变得匮乏，农业便是解决这个问题的一个


方法。但是，众 所周知，当代的采集狩猎者具有很多种控制人口的方法。因此世
界性人口危机的想法就不太可能成立了， 虽然在某些地区可能会存在人口压力。
有人提出冰河时代末期，也就是13000年前的气候变化 是农业起源的原因。
短时期内(以年而不是以世纪为单位)温度急剧上升使得食物资源丰富，采集狩猎< br>者人口增加。但是，气候条件存在波动，造成干湿交替，以致可以获取的动植物
数量忽高忽低。
似乎是气候条件的不稳定性使得那些原本放牧的人安定下来，逐渐发展出了
定居的生活方式 ，这也反过来造成人口增长以及所需食物量的增加。在这些条件
下，农业诞生了。后来，由于人口的急剧 膨胀，这种生活方式就难以改变了。但
是，我们可以说这些条件并不足以解释农业的起源。先前地球经历 了多个气候变
化的时期，但是也没有发展出农业。
考古学家斯蒂文?米森有一个观点，这 在他的《思维的史前史》一书中有精
彩的阐述，该观点认为约在40000年前，人类的思维形成了认知 流动性，即对各
种特化的思维加以整合：技术史、博物学(以理解自然资源的行为和分布)、社交
智能以及语言能力。认识流动性解释了艺术、宗教以及复杂演讲的出现。一旦人
类拥有了这样的思维， 他们就可以找到创造性方法来解决严重的经济危机，例如
先前所述的农业困境。米森提出存在四种可以解 释农业起源的心理因素：(1)打
造集中用于收割以及加工植物资源的工具的能力;(2)将动植物作为 获取社会声望
和权力的手段的趋势;(3)与动物发展出与人类结构相似的“社会关系”的趋势——具体说就把动物当做人(神人同形同性论)以及把人当做动物(图腾崇拜);(4)驯化
动植物的趋 势。


一些社会驯化动植物、发现金属工具的使用、开始识字并且形成国家 ，这些
事实不应使我们忘记其他社会虽发展出了畜牧或园艺(蔬菜园艺)但是仍停留在
文盲状态 ，并且生产力较低;只有少数社会进入了现代的狩猎采集社会。探究使
某些社会选择农业而其他社会停留 在狩猎采集或园艺的条件具有重要的人类学
意义。但是，我们应该记住有很多知晓农业的社会几乎是有意 不选择它。米森的
解释是否恰当还有待讨论，而且近来有些作者已经强调其它因素的重要性了。
新托福TPO21阅读原文(三)：Autobiographical Memory
TPO21-3：Autobiographical Memory
Think back to your childhood and try to identify your earliest memory. How old
were you? Most people are not able to recount memories for experiences prior to the
age of three years, a phenomenon called infantile amnesia. The question of why
infantile amnesia occurs has intrigued psychologists for decades, especially in light of
ample evidence that infants and young children can display impressive memory
capabilities. Many find that understanding the general nature of autobiographical
memory, that is, memory for events that have occurred in one's own life, can provide
some important clues to this mystery. Between ages three and four, children begin to
give fairly lengthy and cohesive descriptions of events in their past. What factors are
responsible for this developmental turning point?
Perhaps the explanation goes back to some ideas raised by influential Swiss
psychologist Jean Piaget—namely, that children under age two years represent events
in a qualitatively different form than older children do. According to this line of
thought, the verbal abilities that blossom in the two year old allow events to be coded
in a form radically different from the action-based codes of the infant. Verbal abilities
of one year olds are, in fact, related to their memories for events one year later. When
researchers had one year olds imitate an action sequence one year after they first saw
it, there was correlation between the children's verbal skills at the time they first saw
the event and their success on the later memory task. However, even children with


low verbal skills showed evidence of remembering the event; thus, memories may be
facilitated by but are not dependent on those verbal skills.
Another suggestion is that before children can talk about past events in their lives,
they need to have a reasonable understanding of the self as a psychological entity. The
development of an understanding of the self becomes evident between the first and
second years of life and shows rapid elaboration in subsequent years. The realization
that the physical self has continuity in time, according to this hypothesis, lays the
foundation for the emergence of autobiographical memory.
A third possibility is that children will not be able to tell their own
until they understand something about the general form stories take, that is, the
structure of narratives. Knowledge about narratives arises from social interactions,
particularly the storytelling that children experience from parents and the attempts
parents make to talk with children about past events in their lives. When parents talk
with children about
children's formation of a framework for talking about the past. They also provide
children with reminders about the memory and relay the message that memories are
valued as part of the cultural experience. It is interesting to note that some studies
show Caucasian American children have earlier childhood memories than Korean
children do. Furthermore, other studies show that Caucasian American mother- child
pairs talk about past events three times more often than do Korean mother-child pairs.
Thus, the types of social experiences children have do factor into the development of
autobiographical memories.
A final suggestion is that children must begin to develop a —an
awareness of the concept of mental states (feelings, desires, beliefs, and thoughts),
their own and those of others—before they can talk about their own past memories.
Once children become capable of answering such questions as
remember?
seem to occur.
It may be that the developments just described are intertwined with and influence
one another. Talking with parents about the past may enhance the development of the


self- concept, for example, as well as help the child understand what it means to
No doubt the ability to talk about one's past represents memory of a
different level of complexity than simple recognition or recall.
TPO21-3译文：自传式记忆
回 忆你的童年并尝试找出你最早的记忆。那时你多大?大多数人无法描述出
有关三岁前经历的记忆，这种现 象就叫做婴儿期遗忘。为什么会发生婴儿期遗忘
这个问题已经引发了心理学家们数十年的兴趣，尤其是有 大量的证据说明婴幼儿
表现出具有令人惊讶的记忆能力。不少人发现理解自传式记忆，即对在某人自己< br>的生活中发生的事件的记忆的一般特性可以为这个不解之谜提供一些重要的线
索。3到4岁的儿童 开始可以对自己过去经历过的事情给出相当长的具有连贯性
的描述。是什么因素导致了这个发育的转折点 。
也许对这个问题的解释可以追溯到具有影响力的瑞士心理学家让·皮亚杰，
他认为两岁 以下的儿童与大于两岁的儿童回忆事件的方式有质的不同。根据这个
思路，两岁的儿童发展出的语言能力 可以使他们对事件的组织方式与婴儿基于动
作的组织方式有根本的差异。事实上，一岁儿童的语言能力与 他们一年后对事件
的记忆有关。当研究人员让一岁的儿童们在第一次见到一个动作顺序后的一年模
仿这个动作顺序，他们能否成功完成这个记忆任务与他们第一次看到这个事件时
的语言能力相关。但是 ，即使是语言能力很差的儿童也显示出了记得该事件的证
据，因此，语言能力可以促进记忆，但是记忆并 不依赖于语言能力。
另有人提出在儿童能够讲述他们过去经历的事情之前，儿童需要对把自我当< br>做一个心理实体有合理的认识。对自我的认识的发展在1到2岁之前非常明显，
并在随后的几年中 显示出迅速地细致化。根据这个假说，身体自我在时间上的连
续性是出现自传式记忆的基础。


第三种可能是儿童在他们理解故事发生的一般形式，即叙述的结构以前无法
描述 他们自己的“生活故事”。有关叙述的知识来源于社会互动，尤其是父母给儿
童讲故事以及父母尝试跟孩 子聊聊孩子们过去经历的事情。当父母跟孩子们说起
“昨天我们做了什么”或者“上周”或者“去年”时 ，他们就会引导儿童形成讲述往事
的框架。他们还唤醒了孩子们的记忆，并且向孩子们传达了记忆是文化 体验宝贵
的一部分的信息。值得一提的是有些研究显示白种美国儿童比韩国儿童的童年记
忆更早 。此外，其它研究显示白种美国母亲与孩子交流过往的事情的次数是韩国
母亲与孩子的三倍。因此，儿童 具有的社会经验的类型是发展出自传式记忆的一
个因素。
最后一种解释是儿童必须在他们 能够讲述自己对过去的记忆前开始发展出
一种“心理理论”——对他们自己或别人的心理状态(感觉、欲 望、信仰和思想)概
念的认识。一旦儿童能够回答诸如“记得是什么意思?”以及“知道某事或某物是什
么意思?”等问题的时候，这就会促进他们可能发生的记忆。
可能上面描述的各种发育之 间会相互交织并且相互影响。与父母聊聊往事可
以加强自我认知的发展，举例来说，就像帮助儿童理解什 么是“记得”一样。讲述
自己的往事无疑代表了比简单的认出或回忆更为复杂的记忆。


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